There are a lot of little government programs designed to help people out. The Federal Trade Commission has a department and a response center designed to educate the public about identity theft, and a must-do list for people on debt management programs. The Department of Health and Human Services has a site that outlines tips to prevent medical errors.
Ultimately, the government manages a trust of money - taxes - to help support the people live lives that will yield success through work. And in many ways, it does that. But it seems that most of these programs languish in obscurity. I hope that the government continues its modernization, and that the public will be able to actually use the programs.
The idea of searching that sort of thing, presidential YouTubes/podcasting and other similar innovations may not be so far-fetched, if we have a president who's willing to actually talk to us plebians.
For the first time in recent memory, and perhaps ever, I came home with an appreciable amount of groceries (~$70) without any meat.
I've never really had a problem with eating meat in general. It's a bit of a cruel fact that animals eat each other all the time, and in the wild it's not even as nice as a quick blow to the head. I do have more of a problem when the source is completely unidentifiable... and even then I sometimes eat it (Rachel won't), and just with happy thoughts. But if the government, activists and corporations can agree that factory farming is ultimately socially destructive (damaging the environment and risking airborne diseases) and not as profitable as they might seem (due to disease and condition control in tight spaces), the meat industry can move ahead with a relatively clear conscience. And so will a lot of other people, myself included.
Of course, with that clear conscience, they should probably still eat a lot less meat. Americans eat far more meat than is really necessary to stay healthy. I wasn't much different for a long while, and am now cutting back a bit.
"At the end of the day, you want someone who knows what they're doing on day one"
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on MSNBC with Brian Williams, 12 Feb 08 (video).
"What he doesn't have is the old, you know the old Mondale: "what the beef?" What are the details, and what is it going to cost? Which I assume one day we'll learn."
Bob Dole on MSNBC with Brian Williams, 12 Feb 08 (video).
This is beginning to irritate me. When Barack Obama was initially criticized for having too much content, a tone too professorial. People have noticed his soaring rhetoric in the last six months not because nobody cared before, but because he didn't use it as much before. When he made the shift, the New York Times devoted an entire article about the shift to more pointed rhetoric.
I don't know why this is the case. Obama has posted an absurd amount of information on his campaign website. Take environmental and energy reform. Senator Obama's page has twenty pages in PDF format detailing environmental and energy reform, and several very specific plans to cap carbon emissions, solutions for green energy, and so on. Senator Clinton has a little less, and it's not as well-presented, but the plans are equally robust.
Thankfully, this is beginning to get some attention. Just a few days ago, Matt Yglesias (who's working for the Atlantic just like my favorite blogger Andrew Sullivan) posted a great rundown of why it's ridiculous, and Carpetbagger followed up, although I think he Googled the wrong thing: he should've been looking for all the Hillary proponents who parrot the meme.
On the other hand, John McCain's website has a video of his stances on the environment (great Republicans were environmentalists, his belief in global warming, his concern with China and India, and oil independence). These are sensible stances, and ones he shares with Obama. Compared to the Democratic side, it's paltry. Even on issues that McCain ought to have a world of information (such as national security), there are no numbers. His positions are clear, but the means to accomplish them are not. That's not to say McCain doesn't know or understand his own positions, but how am I as a voter supposed to find out, if he doesn't put it on his own website?
So John McCain has some work to do, if he's going to try to convince the American people that Obama truly is trying "to encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas [and offering] not a promise of hope, [but] a platitude," well, he better get his own ideas out there.
I'm going to be comparing and contrasting the two candidates (Clinton's toast, in my opinion) from time to time for a while.
In this post, I'm looking at character: the candidates' grounding in their beliefs and their general honesty and integrity.
I find this is a wash.
It's hard to criticize John McCain on character. He earned his way through the military, made a name for himself out of the shadow of his father, and what he did as a P.O.W. is impossible for myself and most other people to understand, even if it was thirty years ago. His reputation as a "maverick" isn't undeserved, and he has made a lot of stands with both sides of the aisle in Congress, and has angered the far-left as well as the far-right fairly regularly. He has also had a positive campaign.
Barack Obama's history is also almost impossible to criticize: he didn't have a lot going for him demographically (the child of a teen mom whose father left him), he worked hard, worked his way through Harvard and in a pretty dramatic way, declined the rich jobs as a high-time lawyer to work on the streets of Chicago.
John McCain should really be admired for his willingness to say in straightforward terms that he wants the Middle East to have the kind of American influence that we've had in Korea, Japan, and Germany (though, of course, not in Vietnam): 100 years of permanant bases. I don't think that's a realistic goal, but I have to say that his willingness to say something that he must've known he would be criticized for endlessly reflects well on his character.
Barack Obama is also keeping with that sort of honesty in an equally impressive manner, when he goes to Detroit to tell automakers to stop building terrible cars. He preached gay rights in a Southern Baptist church. That sort of thing is incredible, as well.
So I'll start this series saying that I can't be happier about the two parties' choices. I had made plans to leave the country, on the occasion that the nominations were to have gone to Hillary and Giuliani. Instead, I look forward to a tough but issues-centric campaign that ultimately will help Americans understand their own politics and nation better.
There are a lot of things that impress me about Barack Obama, but his desire to use technology to create transparency in government is one issue that truly does set him apart.
His campaign updates his YouTube channel about a half dozen times per day, often including in-depth interviews with promoters, footage of promotional stops, and many well-edited and mixed TV interviews. Hillary updates 3-5 times a week, mostly with ads and TV excerpts. I couldn't find an official John McCain outlet. His website includes community webware (think MySpace), and I'm sure helps the people within it organize more effectively.
So when he says that he wants to expand the workings of the first bill he passed as a congressman, his "Google for Government" program, to organize and make transparent the government's workings through technology, I believe him. That transparency can be seized upon by a concerned America, because the government isn't great at policing itself. Barack knows that.
In this way, his message is different from Hillary's: "We" versus "She." She wants to fix things. It's a noble sentiment. But Barack knows that no politician in Washington can fix the nation. WE have to do it, and we have to be enabled by political communities like on his website, and OnTheIssues.
There are other good examples of technology being used as part of sensible, positive change. He went to Detroit to insist that they change their technology (despite the tepid applause). He promised to help them by subsidizing R&D costs in exchange for progress and commitment from them and the American people. The Obama health care plan wants to streamline and digitize our medical records, most of which are inexplicably still on paper.
The lack of these credentials and ideas in the propositions and efforts on the part of the current administration (who prefers the destructive status quo), as well as that of McCain (who has no interest), and Clinton (who has no excuse, really).
Driftglass on why Obama's enthusiasm/inspiration matters in the practical affairs of politics:
People are willing to go to war for scraps of cloth called flags.
They are willing to die for scraps of wood called a cross.
And 70 years ago as their world fell apart, Americans were willing to give their hearts away to a horse.
A horse.
Because people are flesh and blood, not circuits and spreadsheets, and we need hope and inspiration every bit as much as we need 10-point programs.
Which unfortunately makes us go weak in the knees for saints and charlatans alike.
Maybe this not the way it should be, but it is the way it is, and as proud members of the Reality Based community we need to accommodate ourselves to the fact that human nature is a force every bit as real and formidable as gravity.
If you do not understand this, you will never understand politics.
I'm a graphic designer. So when I see this, it just makes me very happy. In fall, when the race starts heating up, I am gonna print these up (or maybe get some people in the Obama campaign to do it!).
I realized today, while lying face-down on the bed blowing raspberries, that materials with different thread-count (which is a sign of quality) respond differently to trying to make farting sounds (raspberries).
I really wish that, when snooty rich people went shopping for quality linens, they would put their faces up to it and make farting sounds to judge the quality. That would be awesome.
All told, I think the ultimate tribute to God, in any form, is to maximize individual freedom –- and not to obstruct that freedom for others. The thing that puzzles me about moralistic government is that if you force everyone in the country to act a certain way morally, there ceases to be free will. Then nobody is truly benevolent at all, just pawns of the state. If I’m forced to act in a Christian manner by threat of law, am I really a Christian? Seems like this is quite detrimental to the Church. And to be honest, I’m just as afraid of fiscal liberals as I am of social conservatives in this regard. If the government hijacks my income to redistribute it into some form of pork designed to help the less fortunate, especially when it doesn’t go toward its intended purpose anyway, not only are they stealing from me, but they’re preventing me from being charitable. It’s destructive for all parties.
Granted, I differ from ACLU-libertarians who claim God should be totally undetectable in the public forum -- and atheism didn’t do the Soviet Union any favors. But let’s not be so sanctimonious in our governance and let’s be wary of the Mike Huckabees and the Hillary Clintons of the world. And more importantly, let’s not give up on ourselves as individuals.
That's it. Exactly. I am going to be shouting this from the hilltops whenever I meet someone who thinks a making the U.S.A. a Good Christian Nation (as opposed to what we want, which is a Good Nation) is a good idea.
I don't have a big problem with McCain in general, but for some reason the angry co-worker in this Ugly Hill comic seems to look like an angry, monsterfied version of the Senator.
Of course, he makes plenty of cartoonishly angry faces on his own.
The kind of man that can tell an Atlanta church to embrace homosexuals, the Detroit Autoworkers Union to stop making crappy cars, and the American people that they're part of the solution is a man I want to be President.
The kind of man with the foresight to realize that Iraq was going to be a disaster, not out of some naive optimism, but because he wanted to go after the people who'd actually attacked.
The kind of man that would help a competitor in a debate, even if it meant giving up the advantage.
The kind of man who proudly proclaims himself a Hopemonger, and says: "in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."
The kind of man that inspires people from all places: poor men to pop stars, in the country, in the cities, and yes, Democrats and Republicans.
It used to be the people in power could pretty much sit back, have orgies and collect taxes until the Revolution came, and when it did they were treated to a quick death that sure beat syphilis.
Now, the best they can hope for is a blowjob and some kickbacks (although, the above is still true in parts of the Middle East, former parts of the USSR, and most of Africa).
The biggest reason for that is that in developed countries, the citizenry have raised the bar of expectations to levels a 13th-century serf couldn't have imagined: free education, good roads, and food regulations. More recently, free public health care and welfare programs have upped the ante substantially (to mixed success). The government is suddenly there for the common good! But it's not the easiest thing to get people to do what's good for them in the long term, or as a whole, when they can do stuff that benefits them in the short-term but hurts the group as a whole.
Take those ubiquitous little plastic shopping bags. About two thousand are made per second (42 billion per year), and a lot of them end up in landfills, but an awful lot end up in forests, streams and sewage systems. It's a little problem, on an individual scale, but when anything is multiplied by millions or billions, things get dicey. This is the kind of problem that governments are ideally suited to fix. Ireland has done a nice job in the way that a government knows best: action through taxes. It charged 33 cents per bag sold (a type of 'sin tax') and suddenly everyone uses cloth bags, putting the plastic bags in the category of social ills like not picking up your dog's poo.
This is how governments can do some real good very easily: appeal to the Capitalist system we use to make it profitable or in people's best interest to do the right thing. Obama wants to charge companies and power-plants for every pound of smog produced, and give the income to subsidize the companies that buck up and use more expensive, non-polluting means.
The curious phenomenon of people feeling gratified about making the first post in a popular comment thread (such as this example on Barack Obama's website) always weirded me out a little. Those people would have no trouble on my little blog, since I hadn't had any comments posted on it since early 2006. Since it's mostly a means of getting ideas down, and cataloging things that I think are awesome, I don't mind yelling into the black hole that is the blogosphere. I've been keeping a homepage for similar reasons since 1994.
I hadn't had any comments from people I didn't know until a few weeks ago, on the 24th. I had my first 2 comments posted by people I didn't know in person. It took me almost two weeks to even notice.
The first post was in response to my short riff on responsible feminism, which also applies to most activist ideas. A very nice person named Cate basically posted an agreement post, which I appreciate in bewilderment at the frightening idea that people might actually read what I write.
The other one, amusingly, was in response to my Will Rogers anti-consumerist quote. It said that the best way to save money was to get coupons and provided a link to a coupon website; this is possibly the best bit of spam I've ever seen.
The prospect of people actually reading my work prompted me to re-design the blog's look for the umpteenth time. I hate using templates (I'm a web designer, after all), and I take nice pictures sometimes, but I've had a terribly difficult time getting a good photo to work. So I am eating a lollipop, and notice it's very green... and there you go.
Climactic moment in Type O Negative's hit Love You to Death, where the singer soars with the lyric, "Am I good enough for you?" It was spine-chillingly glorious when I was a teenager, rife with self-doubt and insecurity. "You," in that line, became about a dozen girls I'd had a crush on through all of high school and later in college. I think my wife eventually was included in that thought, as well.
But it's not something that many guys past age 30 will find themselves singing. Then again, the line "I would do anything to make you cum," is repeated about a dozen times over a minute and a half in the following song, and that isn't something normally associated with the 'settled' man, either.
Also, success has its own draw away from inspiration. Back in 2000, when the Smashing Pumpkins were breaking up, Billy Corgan noted in Rolling Stone that "when we had no money, no nothing, there was nothing else to do but be grungy and be in a band. Now there are many other options: 'I could be skiing.'"
So I suppose it's not such a shock that many bands lose their luster well before age thirty. It's a rare band that's so happy with each other and so hungry for improvement that they stay together and relevant (U2 comes to mind).
I've spent so much time messing with my computer, and under such stress while doing it, that my biceps are sore. I worried so intensely, I slept about four hours of the 72 between Saturday morning and Monday. I freaked out so bad, I gave myself a cold.
My computer basically forgot where Windows was. After backing up everything onto an external hard drive, I spent three days trying to install Vista. I failed; the RAID setup was impossibly screwed up.
Sean, who recently inherited my mantle as "friend who knows a lot about computers," came down to Tucson on Thursday for the SuperBowl to hang out with his friend Andy. He came down early to help me out. That day, the Spurs played the Suns, Obama debated Hillary, and I was praying to turn my $2000 paperweight into my means of doing my job again. I was pretty nervous on Thursday afternoon.
We completely disassembled the machine, used some isopropyl alcohol to clean every connector. We then put it all back together - Sean did a dynamite job with the wire cleanup - and fired it up. After a few hours' work, it was running.
The Suns lost a close but terrible game to the Spurs, Obama did very well in the debat, and my computer is running. Two out of three ain't bad.
It turns out that a particular Windows update killed Windows. Now everything is back, backed up several ways, and my only complaint is that working on this until 6 AM has messed up my sleep schedule. January, a hard month, is over. Super Tuesday is coming up in a few days. I feel like I hit the reset button on my own health and mental state.
In general, I like Microsoft Vista. They made a lot of changes that obviously needed to happen, added a bit of chrome, and generally it works for me. Now, I realize this is because my computer kicks ass: two dual-core 3GHz 64-bit processors, 4GB RAM, two RAID arrays totaling 1TB, and a pair of 512MB video cards connected to a pair of flat monitors.
Yeah, I know.
The trouble with Vista, though, is often that it's new: compatibility and configuration are a bit harder. I had this problem when I couldn't figure out why my video card wouldn't display higher than 1024x768 (I prefer 1280x1024). Thankfully, there was this little article on softpedia, describing the symptoms exactly and how to get around it.
Apart from the incredible convenience of the article, it's remarkable how specific the article is. This is an example of how the Internet allows for group thinking that isn't hampered by "groupthink." The first time I saw this potential was way back in 2001 when the movie A.I. had the first really successful alternate reality game (later named by its participants The Beast). The game was impossibly difficult for any one person - it required people to work together. Unfortunately for the developers, their own puzzles (which required knowledge of dozens of languages, expertise in chemistry, physics, philosophy, programming, and other sciences) would be solved within minutes by the thousands of people who worked on the solutions. Inevitably, someone in the Cloudmakers (as the participants named themselves; the website is down but the link goes to the Wayback Machine cache from 2002) knew how to solve the problem.
I love this concept: the Internet allows communication between people. People are generally inherently capable. MIT created "Fab Labs" that were able to create most anything (3-d printer, circuitboard printers, etc.). 3 students at MIT are doing their theses on the work of six year old villagers in Africa, who had better basic designs than the engineers in the U.S. Harnessing the total knowledge of a huge group of people is something that, if it can be done efficiently (i.e., with a minimum of groupthink), would be as massive a step forward as the Industrial Revolution.
I'm pretty glad to be alive sometimes.
This dissemination of information isn't limited to merely solving technical problems or riddles. It has also been suggested by Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) that if a massive e-mail pen pal initiative among all nations would make it vastly more difficult to go to war:
"You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family?"
Also, if that family helped design your super-cool phone/lamp/radiator, you might think twice if you wanted to upgrade anytime soon.
